What does it take to build a consulting business from zero to nearly $1 billion in revenue in just six years?
In the latest edition of Expert Opinion, Alan Brew sits down with Chip Register, CEO of Argano, to discuss one of the more remarkable growth stories in professional services.
Backed by Trinity Hunt Partners, Argano has grown through more than 30 acquisitions while maintaining the entrepreneurial energy, client focus, and employee engagement typically associated with boutique firms.
The conversation explores:
- Why Argano set out to build something “new, different, and better” rather than another consulting firm
- How the company scaled a platform of specialist boutiques without losing what made them successful
- The role of culture, purpose, and storytelling in integrating acquisitions and attracting talent
- The Four Cs that guide Argano’s acquisition strategy: Completeness, Connectedness, Claim, and (yes) Quality
- Why Chip believes leaders should distinguish between obstacles and barriers when building companies
- How Trinity Hunt’s long-term perspective helped create the conditions for sustained growth
- The origin story behind the Argano brand and the powerful metaphor that continues to guide the company’s mission
It’s an insightful dialog about growth, culture, private equity, brand building, and what it takes to create an organization people want to join and clients want to trust.
Episode Transcript
[This is an edited version of the transcript. Listen to the full interview by clicking the player above.]
Alan: This is Alan Brew with another edition of Expert Opinion.
Today’s big question, what does it take to build a digital consulting business from a standing start to more than a billion dollars in revenue and 3,000 employees globally in just six years?
Here to answer that question and others is our guest today, Chip Register. Chip is CEO of Argano, a global digital consultancy that helps businesses modernize operations, build intelligent digital operating platforms and improve financial and operational performance.
Before joining Argano, Chip served as co-CEO of Publicis Sapient, one of the world’s largest digital transformation consultancies. Chip, welcome to Expert Opinion.
Chip: Thank you, Alan. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Alan: To set the scene, Argano was founded in 2020, backed by private equity firm, Trinity Hunt. You’re on track to reach a billion dollars in revenue. The organization was formed from three founding firms, Keste, InterRel Consulting, and United Virtualities.
Chip: That’s correct. June of 2020, we’re coming up on our sixth birthday next week.
Alan: Many happy returns. Chip, first question, when you look at Argano today, a rapidly growing consultancy built in just six years, what do you believe you got fundamentally right at the beginning?
Chip: I think the answer to that is really in the work we did before starting the company.
I’ll have to tell you, it came from a lot of skepticism because my background was in running large consultancies, and I had a lot of hesitation about why you would want to build another one. It seemed to me there was already a giant pile of them out there. Just adding another one to the pot didn’t seem like a great idea.
There were a couple of founding ideas. The first came from a typical private equity or investor conversation: What kind of company would you want to build?
My first answer was, “I don’t want to build one,” because it wasn’t obvious to me that we could create something with the kind of value I wanted to see created.
But we said, if we do build one, it’s got to be three things: new, different, and better, in that order. New is not necessarily different, and different is not necessarily better.
So we asked ourselves what would make it new and different, but different in a positive way. We weren’t looking for a little differentiation around the edges. It had to be built differently, with a different value proposition, in order for it to be worth doing and not just another rock on the pile.
We broke that problem into three areas.
The first came from my background in the front-end space, the digital agency world, working with Sapient and Publicis and being in the room when the digital agency model emerged. As the Digital Experience Platform took off, Sapient was a preeminent leader in creating the concept of the digital agency.
That model came from a recognition that the roles of the CIO and the CMO were changing and that digital experience was going to mean something different. The digital agency brought technology, consulting, brand, and marketing together into one organization to solve problems around the Digital Experience Platform.
When we asked ourselves what we were going to do that was new and better, we realized we had the same problem in 2020 that we had in 2005. If you look at the Digital Operating Platform, all the platforms and processes that make a company run, as opposed to the platforms that help it grow, there needed to be an organization dedicated to that mission in the same way digital agencies had been dedicated to digital experience.
There were plenty of people doing the work, but there wasn’t a parallel organization focused on the Digital Operating Platform. That’s what we set out to build. We set out to build the digital agency for operations.
That was the first idea: a value proposition that didn’t exist and a brand that didn’t exist.
But that alone wasn’t satisfying enough because there were two other challenges, two other forces we wanted to defy.
One involved the actual work and value proposition of large-scale companies. There’s a logic to scale. You want to do large things for large clients. You want to do transformations, not projects. But scale itself isn’t the goal.
There are plenty of companies out there with 250,000 to 750,000 employees that I don’t rate very highly. Having run large companies, I know what I’m talking about, although I also take some of the blame for it.
Their financial models are often driven by solving the world’s capacity problems rather than the world’s business problems. If you crack open the financials, the metrics that matter tend to be utilization, pricing, and similar measures, not how effectively they’re solving business problems.
You can see the result in customer satisfaction. As companies get bigger and bigger, customer satisfaction tends to erode.
So we asked, “Who has great customer satisfaction over long periods of time?”
We started looking at boutiques. They’re smaller. They’re exceptionally good at something. They deliver great client experiences. They have sticky client relationships. They tend to grow quickly and operate at high margins because of the expertise they represent.
Then we asked, “What if you could scale by putting them next to each other?”
But you would have to do it very carefully, not just slam them together and create the kind of mess you’ve often seen in M&A activity across large GSIs.
In my view, that approach hasn’t been tremendously successful. You needed a different model, one that would allow boutiques to collaborate on a platform that could offer enterprise clients both breadth of capability and depth of delivery without destroying what made those firms successful in the first place.
That was a major realization for us. It wouldn’t just be a new offering. It would be a new delivery model.
After more than 30 acquisitions, I think we’ve largely figured out our approach, and I think it’s a better one. So, new, different, and better. I think it’s better.
The third area was employee engagement.
If customer satisfaction declines with scale, employee engagement declines even faster. When you’re talking about organizations with 200,000, 300,000, 500,000, or 700,000 people, you can imagine the anonymity that comes with being an employee in those environments.
Before we started the company, we recognized that many, perhaps most, of the people who would work here, especially in the early years, didn’t actually choose Argano. They came because we acquired their firms.
They worked at those companies for a reason. They’re talented people. They could work anywhere.
Once we acquired those firms, we had an obligation to provide a professional, educational, and even personal experience that met their expectations, or they would leave.
We also recognized that nearly 100 percent of the value we create comes from the talents of individual human beings. We’re not a product company. We’re not manufacturing anything. What we have is talent.
That makes employee experience an enormously important metric.
So through early recognition and significant investment in people, platforms, and strategy, we set out to create a people experience that was second to none and could survive growth.
As you pointed out, we’re approaching a billion dollars in revenue. That’s a substantial company. There aren’t many of them. We achieved that scale in record time because we were able to attract so many outstanding boutique firms onto the platform, while maintaining boutique-like customer satisfaction and boutique-like employee engagement.
At this point, I’d say we got where we wanted to go. It’s still early days, and I feel we’re on the right path. If I look at traditional metrics, we’re a growing company. We’re a profitable company. We’re a well-utilized company. We have good rates and all the things you’d find in a public company’s annual report.
But when I look beyond that, I see very strong customer satisfaction, very high employee engagement, and continued growth. That tells me clients believe in the model.
So I feel like we did something genuinely different, and that was the prerequisite for starting the company in the first place.
Alan: Clearly new and significantly different and from what you say better, Chip. So a clear vision, scaling the boutique model and protecting it, but obviously growing it. The issue of employee engagement is a big one and often with that comes when you acquire businesses it can become one of founder remorse when they sign up and realize that it’s not working for them. At what point did you realize when you started moving forward and acquiring, did you realize Argano was becoming more than a collection of companies?
Chip: I think it was relatively early.
We didn’t really know what we were doing at first, which isn’t unusual when you’re trying to invent something, experiment, learn, and do something for which there is no playbook.
I’d say that after the first two years, we felt pretty confident that we had a working theory and that there was a path forward.
Then, quarter after quarter, we’ve continued to iterate. Some things go right. Some things go wrong. But more goes right than wrong, and eventually you start to feel that the model works.
I also think nothing sells like success.
The fact that we’ve gone from the first four or six joiners on the platform to more than 30 tells you something. If this had been a gigantic disaster, either in terms of performance or reputation, we wouldn’t have had 30 companies line up to join the platform over six years.
Today, we probably look at 200 companies a year. We might narrow that to 25, take a deep look at 15, and ultimately bring on about 10 joiners annually.
So far, we haven’t identified an upper limit to how far we can continue with the same approach. At some point, something may change and we’ll have to adapt. We’re always watching for those indicators.
But right now, I think we have a pretty clear runway to keep doing what we’re doing for a decent amount of time and to continue becoming richer and deeper in what we can offer clients and, hopefully, our people as well.
Alan: When you review the companies, you said 200 and funneled them down to that 10 or so, what criteria do you use to assess who might be a good fit?
Chip: Again, the operating lens is that we’re a platform made up of companies. We’re not a holding company.
There is an integration motion that takes place, but what we’re really looking for is what we internally call the Four Cs. It’s the filter that determines who makes it all the way to the bottom of the gumball machine.
The first C is completeness.
We’re a mosaic, so we’re looking for organizations that complete us, organizations that offer capabilities we don’t already have and that help create complete, connected value chains across our businesses and business units. We’re looking for things that fill gaps and strengthen the whole.
The second C is connectedness.
A lot of what we do, as is true in all large-scale systems integration, starts with data and then connects applications, cloud platforms, and all sorts of other technologies.
The question is: Can we match the constellation of investments our clients have already made?
I don’t know if this is news to anybody, but large clients use everything. It’s really a question of how you connect it all. They’re using Salesforce for one thing, Oracle for another, AWS for something else, Anaplan somewhere else, and Workday somewhere else. However you want to think about it, they’ve already made a series of technology bets, and we’re going to have to operate in that environment.
We’re looking for capabilities that allow us to tell a client, “You have all these technologies, and we have all these practices. We know how these constellations fit together.”
The third C is claim.
We’re looking for things we can be known for. We’re the largest in the world at this. We’re the best in the world at that.
You see it in awards. You see it in analyst recognition. You see it in partner-of-the-year honors from technology publishers and platform providers. Those things add credibility to the brand and strengthen our position in the market.
The fourth C is, and I’m from Alabama, so I’m probably the only person in the company who thinks this is funny, but the fourth C is quality.
We had to force that one in, but it didn’t bother me.
We’re moving very far, very fast. We don’t do fixer-uppers. We don’t do birds with broken wings.
The companies that join Argano are already high-performing, high-engagement, high-satisfaction organizations. We need people who can operate at this pace and who share the same expectations around quality that we do.
They have to be able to hit the ground running at our speed.
We don’t really have time for, “This would be a great company if…” because we simply don’t have the time to stop and fix things.
Alan: So, the Four Cs. When you identify companies that fit those criteria, what’s the value proposition to them? Obviously, they fit the model, but what do you say to get them excited about Argano?
Chip: I think the answer is embedded in those Four Cs.
For them, and for their people, there’s an opportunity to express whatever talent they have in a much broader and more connected way, with access to a much larger client base.
The work becomes more interesting. They get involved in larger transformations instead of narrower engagements. They’re brought into more complex situations and exposed to a wider range of opportunities.
It’s also exciting for their people because they get to work with technologies, clients, industries, and geographies they may never have encountered before. It creates a very different experience for employees.
And, frankly, it’s easier to grow.
The people who founded these companies are passionate about what they do, but they didn’t get into business because they wanted to become experts in dental plans.
We can handle the large hiring teams, the marketing teams, the finance teams, the compensation and benefits teams, and all the administrative trivia that comes with running a business.
We have people who can do all of that.
That frees the leaders of those companies to spend much more of their time on what they’re actually passionate about: solving problems for clients and creating a great environment for their people.
Alan: Within that story and that proposition, and our early conversation was obviously around the name and the brand, what role did the Argano brand play in attracting companies in terms of the story you could tell them and attracting talent? What was the role of the brand?
Chip: Well, it’s super important. I fell in love with the brand early on, and I’m not a brand person myself, but I know enough to recognize a good one.
I think there’s a lot in the Argano brand that points directly to the essence of the company. What is the purpose of the company? What are we trying to do? Those ideas are embedded in the brand, and they correlate very tightly. If nothing else, the brand helped me explain it to myself. It helped me answer the question: What are we trying to do here?
Argano is the Italian word for a lift, a hoist, or an elevator, something that raises something else up.
There’s a long story that we probably don’t have time to get into about the cathedral in Florence, commonly known as the Duomo. It’s a 673-foot-high dome that isn’t really a dome. Someone essentially drew it on a board and said to a group of architects and builders, “Go build that.”
They turned around and said, “Sir, bad news. Nobody’s ever done something like that before. Domes that aren’t domes tend to collapse under their own weight, and 673 feet is really high.”
As a result, a lot of things had to be invented to make that vision a reality.
The structure itself is unusual. It’s not the traditional cylindrical dome you might see on the Pantheon or similar buildings because those designs are engineered to be self-supporting. This one wasn’t.
So a lot of problems had to be solved. New building materials, architectural techniques, and construction methods all had to be developed to make that vision possible. Somebody had sketched an idea on a piece of paper and said, “Go do that,” without fully appreciating the difficulty involved.
One of the things that had to be invented was the argano, a special type of elevator capable of lifting building materials to those heights and then returning efficiently for another load. It had to operate in multiple directions and at multiple speeds.
In fact, one of the original arganos is still displayed in the museum next to the cathedral. It was so critical to completing the project because nobody had previously figured out how to move building materials of that weight to that height.
The elevator became essential to the design and construction of the Duomo itself.
If you think about it as a metaphor, that’s exactly how we see our role.
Our job is not to tell clients what they should build. It’s not our role to decide what product, service, or experience they should create.
Our role is to invent the things that make their vision possible.
They can draw whatever picture they want on a piece of paper and say, “We need this.” Our job is to figure out how to make it happen. We create the arganos, the things that don’t yet exist but need to exist in order to bring that vision to life.
That understanding was foundational. It goes directly to the difference between solving capacity problems and solving business problems. It became central to the ethos of the company.
We’re inventors. We’re designers. We’re craftsmen. And we’re here to support our clients’ vision of innovation.
Alan: I’ve got to say, Chip too, that clearly your passion around the story and what it means is a driving force around the success of bringing that brand to life and making it and communicating it because we were there at the beginning with you, but you’ve just inspired me all over again with the story and it’s one that’s lived and still lives.
Chip: And it’s a story that’s told. It’s a campfire tale in the company, and even with clients.
When people ask, “What is your company about?” and you tell them the story, they get it immediately.
It’s a metaphor. It’s a teaching aid. But it’s very, very powerful, both for our employees, in terms of why they would want to work at a place like this rather than somewhere else, and for clients, in terms of why they would choose us over some other competitor who may be cheaper or whatever else.
They’ve got to buy into the idea that you’re here to be as inventive as they are and as responsible for success as they are.
When you can talk about that passionately, with real conviction and wide-eyed honesty, I think they feel it immediately.
Alan: That is a differentiator because you can, on a level playing field when you’ve got the same capabilities, to open up a conversation about what you stand for, and the vision around that story must be really inspirational to prospects, to clients you’re talking to, a differentiator.
Chip: Yeah, because I don’t know, I wouldn’t be skilled at it, but I wouldn’t know how to have a conversation about people, rates, prices, and past deals and all that. That would be so dry in terms of why you would want to partner with a firm in your complex integration and transformation efforts. Why would you want to partner with someone if that’s the substance of the conversation as opposed to why they do what they do in the first place and why do their people do what they do in the first place? So I just think those things are highly connected. And again, goes back to our new different, better thing. I think we had to convince ourselves there was a reason to be in business that was different than the conversations that I think most clients have with many partners.
Alan: I love the metaphor. Argano is the tool that makes the impossible possible. Beautiful story. Going back to the practicalities of building a business, Chip, you’re coming up to now what, 30, 31 acquisitions, which is a heck of a pace over six years.
Chip: By the middle of this year, it’ll be, I’d say somewhere in the mid 30s, which is one every other month for six years. So it’s been a fast track for sure.
Alan: So across all those acquisitions and integrations, you’re going to have to focus on many things, very high level and get into the nuts and bolts too of integration, I should imagine. But what has been the hardest thing to align? Is it operations, talent, expectations, culture? What are those things that you found the most important?
Chip: They’re all hard. I think the hard thing to do, I mean, aligning any of those things is just work. The hard thing to do is recognize the differences between them and be willing to take a unique approach to each one. That’s really hard.
Most people… there’s an old saying: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.” I think the ability to work without playbooks, without timelines, and without forced this and forced that is difficult. Integration, for us, is not a principle. To the extent that we integrate anything, it’s because we think it’s valuable to do so, or we don’t.
People like patterns. People like predictability. People like order. To live constantly in a world and an environment of, “We don’t know what the answer is, and we don’t particularly care what the answer is,” is hard on the brain.
You have to leave room for variation, nuance, and experimentation instead of saying, “Look, we’ve got a way to do this. Let’s just do it that way.” Maintaining a culture of flexibility is super, super difficult and super exhausting because your brain has to work about a hundred times harder.
It’s all hard anyway, but this gives you the double-black-diamond degree of difficulty. When you don’t really know what the outcome is, you start every journey never really knowing where the finish line is, and being okay with that.
I always tell new joiners that one of the things they’re really interested in is, “What’s this going to be like? What’s going to happen? When is it going to happen? When is this thing going to happen? When is that thing going to happen? Do you do this? Do you do that?”
And I always tell them, “You may not like this answer, but I have no idea.”
Because we’ve got to get on the same side of the table. You don’t know us very well. We don’t know you very well, other than what’s in PowerPoint decks. We know something about you. You know almost nothing about us. So the smart thing to do is get in a room, sit around the same table, and make a plan.
I’ll guarantee you that your plan is going to be different from anybody else’s plan because you’re coming from a different place in your journey, and you’re going somewhere different within our organization than the company sitting next to you that joined two weeks earlier.
They have a totally different profile. They may be different sizes, have different capabilities, or operate in different geographies. There are a lot of things that make all these companies different.
The act of recognizing that, and then dealing with the consequence of saying, “I don’t know,” is very, very difficult. But I think it’s the smartest work we’ve ever done.
Alan: Difficult, I should imagine, but refreshing honesty because you’re not saying we have all the answers, we solve them together. Yeah.
Chip: Another thing I tell people all the time is, ‘Look, this whole thing is an experiment, and experimentation requires risk, and risk requires failure. So you have to build that into the model. Not everything we try is going to work.’
That happens at a local level with any individual joiner who comes in. We’re in these processes of figuring it out, and we try something, and it doesn’t work. That’s happened a million times. That’s true.
What’s also true is that, at the macro level, we’ve had whole systemic business issues around certain things that didn’t work that we thought might. So it’s just got to be built into the model.
Again, those are cultural issues. You have to design the culture to accept that, which is why the culture has to be grounded in the purpose of the company, not in the work of the company.
Because if you center the culture of the company in the work, then all of that stuff starts to matter. Every performance metric, every failure, every success, that’s where all the attention goes.
If you center it in the purpose, which is that we’re here to build a great company, we’re here to be the partner of invention alongside the world’s great enterprises, and we’re trying to do that in a different and more valuable way, then I can get over the failure.
Alan: And I think you’ve just described the culture of Argano in that answer.
Chip: Well, I hope so. And I came by that recognition. Honestly, I learned, I had lots of great mentors at my former shop, which taught me a lot of great things in this topic. And a lot of them are still friends and a lot of them actually work here.
Alan: Good to hear. One of the things that we come across as a brand strategy firm working with a PE company – there is there’s a soft issue in these acquisitions where you deal with founders that have built the business and are in love with the vision, but they’re also in love with their name and there’s often a reluctance to let go of a name and it becomes sometimes a very awkward conversation about, well, why can’t I keep my name? Did you come across that at all?
Chip: Not once. That might reflect a difference between agencies and consultancies, but everybody I know, everybody who’s joined Argano, was… I’d say that conversation was either at the zero level or at the “let’s do it faster” level.
There were some people who were indifferent. There were others who raced toward the brand because, to them, it represented the ability to get in front of customers in a more powerful, more meaningful, and faster way.
They knew they couldn’t introduce themselves to our customers, and we have a thousand of them, using a brand that would create confusion.
By getting onboard, and I don’t want to get too mechanical here, there are practical considerations as well. What documentation are you signing? Whose name is on the master services agreement? Things like that.
All of them said, “Look, there’s sensitivity around how you move a brand and when you move a brand,” but nobody objected to the idea itself. It was more a question of style.
Some people moved very, very fast. Others had particular reasons for wanting to go a little slower, which was fine. Again, that goes back to our earlier discussion about doing smart things in smart ways.
Someone might say, “Hey, we have a giant annual conference with this partner in four months, so I don’t want to move the brand until after that because it’ll confuse everybody.”
Someone else might say, “Hey, our conference is in four months. I want to move the brand before that because we want to show up as Argano.”
It’s one of those situations where you’ve got to sit around the table with a very open mind and make smart decisions, one at a time.
Alan: You launched Argano at a period of enormous disruption with the COVID pandemic, and it’s not stopped since then, I should imagine for your business. How much of Argano’s growth came from timing and how much came from having that clear point of view about where the market was headed and additionally, how is AI playing into your future?
Chip: Yeah, you’re right. We went straight from COVID into a financial crisis, and then into an AI revolution. We haven’t had a normal day here.
If we had started this company in 2015 and were talking in 2021, it would have been a totally different experience. You would have had a basically up-and-to-the-right, static model. That has not made anything easier.
I’d say we’ve had to be very thoughtful about how we select joiners, how we grow, how we go to market, and how we handle integrations.
COVID had a big impact on workforce planning and management, and on how clients changed the way they consumed services. Then you hit the financial crisis. We’re a private equity, debt-backed firm, so interest rates doubling in, whatever it was, nine months, hurt us and hurt our clients. Rising interest rates depleted free cash flow from their budgets, and all of a sudden demand dropped pretty precipitously. That certainly left a mark.
Now we’ve come back from that and gone into a world of AI transformation. I’m very bullish on AI transformation. I think it’s good for not every single thing, but it’s good for how we’re going to continue to innovate on behalf of ourselves and our clients, move forward, and do bigger and better things. It’s a great productivity tool. It’s a great innovation tool. I’m very excited to see where it all goes.
I think we’re all in for a lot of interesting days ahead, but it’s also a challenge because nobody really knows when it’s coming, what’s coming, what’s going to be adopted quickly, what’s going to take longer, or what the next big announcement will be.
As with all times of great technological change, it raises the uncertainty index on which way True North points in your business strategy. I think we’re decent at adapting to it, but it’s another level of challenge to deal with.
As I said, since our inception in 2020, there has almost never been any other operating condition, so we’re now almost too used to it.
Alan: Well, you mentioned Chip there, you mentioned the private equity ownership and your partnership with Trinity Hunt. Tell us briefly what made the relationship with Trinity Hunt productive? How do you stay on the same page with them and align around a long-term plan rather than simply assembling assets and having a short horizon?
Chip: Yeah, I think it’s really the word you just used, or actually two words.
The first is long-term. They made it very clear from the get-go that we’re here to build something great, and that takes the time it takes. It wasn’t, “Hey, if we’re not out of here in four years, this is a huge disappointment.”
We talk every day, and I’ve never gotten anything but support for the strategies we’re pursuing and the patience to let them unfold as they should. There are always changes coming at us that we have to respond to. Some accelerate us, some slow us down, and some we don’t fully understand yet. They’ve been great partners in working through all of that.
The second is culture. I certainly buy into theirs, and I think they buy into ours. We share a belief in how culture makes a company great.
There’s an old saying: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” I think they run their business that way, and they recognize the value of us running ours that way as well.
We’re both 100% people-based, talent-based businesses, so we’re very aligned on that.
I’ve worked with and for other private equity firms that may have been more challenging than Trinity Hunt, but this type of work is what they specialize in. Working with teams like mine is all they do, and I think they’re very, very good at it.
Again, they have a somewhat different perspective on what creates value and when that value needs to be created. I think we’ve been very successful together, and I think we’re all happy with where we are.
What I don’t sense is a lot of pressure along the lines of, “Hey, this has to be this way by this date.”
Instead, the conversation is, “What do we do today to create more value tomorrow?”
Alan: Last question. If you were speaking to a founding CEO who’s sitting in your seat at the beginning of this journey where you were six years ago facing the same growth curve acquisitions and market pressure and endless competing priorities, what would you tell them to focus on first?
Chip: A couple of things.
One, and I think you’re aware of this, I recently wrote an article for a magazine. It hasn’t been published yet, so I won’t say too much about it, but it focuses on recognizing the difference between obstacles and barriers.
We come out of a fairly static environment over the last 20 or 30 years in this business. Along the way, a lot of ideas emerged in both digital services and private equity that were treated almost like laws. It turned out many of them weren’t laws at all.
They weren’t barriers in the way the sound barrier is a barrier. If you hit 741 miles an hour, or whatever the number is, the plane comes apart. That’s how people talked about these things.
What they really were were obstacles. They were real, and they were difficult, but they didn’t necessarily make the plane come apart.
Understanding the difference between a barrier and an obstacle, and being willing to judge those things for yourself instead of reading them in some digital services handbook or private equity handbook that supposedly tells you what’s allowed and what’s not allowed, is incredibly important.
Being able to make those judgments, take appropriate risks, and challenge assumptions is how you get to doing things that are new, different, and better, rather than simply following a herd of accumulated logic from the last 50 years.
That’s a big one.
The other is understanding the role that culture, ethos, and purpose play in building companies. I think it’s deeply underappreciated.
The ability to inspire through storytelling, and to use stories as a metaphor for your ethos, for what you actually want to do, is incredibly powerful. You have to be able to articulate that not just through words, but through images, activities, and brands.
That’s how people absorb ideas. Whether they’re employees, potential recruits, clients, or investors, people respond to stories.
If you can tell a story that animates what you want to do and why you want to do it, that’s amazingly powerful. And I think you have to do it very early. You have to build it into the design from the beginning.
You were part of helping us think through that, and we’ve already discussed how pivotal it was to the success and evolution of the entire enterprise.
Almost nothing we do every day has anything to do with an elevator. But everything we do every day has something to do with an elevator because it became an image that everybody understood. It translated the work into meaning.
I think that’s what people are always looking for because the work changes, but the meaning doesn’t.
As long as people can connect their effort, regardless of the what and the how, to the why, that remains relatively constant. It remains inspiring, encouraging, and meaningful during all the hours they invest in these things, rather than simply building this widget or that widget.
As the work changes, the purpose doesn’t.
That’s what people gravitate toward. And when I say people, I mean that in the broadest sense: employees, investors, and clients. They gravitate toward a story like that.
Alan: Well, what an inspirational note to end on, translating work into meaning and clearly you’ve managed to do that with Argano, Chip. Congratulations on what you and the Argano team have built in a remarkably short period of time. It’s been such a rewarding journey for me personally too, to watch what you’ve done with the brand and where you’ve taken it. And we wish you continued success with what you’ve got there and the team that you’ve got. Thank you for joining us today, Chip. We wish you all the best and continued success.
Chip: Look forward to catching up again soon.
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